Stefano Micossi is Director-General of Assonime, a business association and private think tank in Rome, Chairman of the board of CIR Group, and a member of the board of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels.

Comments

One can always say, in retrospect, that a bank that runs through its usable capital cushion was overleveraged, but one of the mysteries with respect to the financial crisis is that the banks, even when they were accumulating relatively low-yielding PLMBS/CDOs because of the capital relief they offered under Basel I and the Recourse Rule, apparently weren´t using this capital relief to increase their leverage, which remained steady (in the aggregate) during the years before the crisis. One possible answer is that banks, by using capital arbitrage to obtain capital relief, were expanding their "extra" prudential capital cushion by lowering the legally mandated capital floor (keeping their leverage levels steady) since capital devoted to the extra cushion is necessary in the face of an unpredictable future, while capital devoted to the legal cushion is wasted, or at least, its buffer function is limited. And of course the ultimate causes of the crisis lie deeper; as long as the financial and monetary sectors are organized along collectivist planning principles, there will be crises and recessions... Read more

The banking system is not an isolated individual sector of the economy. Banking system of the stock markets are like communicating vessels. You can not adjust the level in one of the vessels by the same rules, and the level in the other by different rules if those rules are not compatible. Because of this, attempts to remove the banking sector, the speculative component of the system without changing the stock markets are doomed to failure. The present system of stock market works on itself, and not on the real economy. And the economy can not develop without a reliable system of redistribution of investment. The situation is close to a deadlock and no systematic change in this area has no solution. ( http://crisismir.com/analiticheskie-materialy/ekonomika/54-chto-god-gryadushhij-nam-gotovit-prognoz-na-2012-god-i-ne-tolko.html ) If these changes do not hold consciously, it will make the global crisis. but then the way is through a huge collapse of the stock market itself. Read more

Regulation of banks now focuses primarily on bank solvency, the adequacy of their assets for backing banks' liabilites to their depositors. But assets come under strain because of the requirement on banks to engage in a daily scramble for liquidity through the inter-bank lending markets to meet their payment settlement obligations to their customers. This is a system which evolved in the days when scarce gold was the means of final settlement and what little there was had to be kept in constant circulation within the payments system. But final settlement is now through central bank reserves and there is no physical constraint on the availability of these. The crisis-prone banking system would be rendered immediately more robust by removing customers' transactions accounts (demand deposits) from banks' balance sheets and relocating them directly to the central bank, with commercial banks being charged with merely administering these accounts on their customers' behalf.Read more

A brilliant article that summarizes the essence of banking leverage and how public interests could be balanced. I am attracted to the final remedy that has been prescribed, which directly works against the fundamental driver of risk behavior in banks, Return on Equity. By one to one conversion of debt to equity it is this parameter that would be impacted most, and which Bank Management had tried to diligently work on as bulk of the incentives are tied to preserving the lower value of the denominator, rather than the increased value of the numerator in the ROE.

Robert Skidelsky
on why the right economic policies cannot work without the right public expectations.

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